Page 57 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"All of them." Her mouth curves against my shoulder. "Especially the last one."

She pulls back. She looks at the worktable, where the mortar sits at the edge and the half-ground herbs sit in the bowl. She reaches past me. She picks up the mortar. She carries it to the fire, and with hands that don't shake, she tips the contents into the flames.

The herbs catch with a brief, bright flare that smells like alpine bloodroot and glacier moss and the end of a performance that lasted longer than it should have. The flare dies. The fire settles.

Signe sets the mortar on the hearth. She turns back to me. Her hands are steady, and the steadiness means something it never meant before. Not control but choice. Not suppression but release. Not the careful grip of a woman holding herself together but the open palms of a woman who has decided the holding was the thing that needed to end.

My left fist opens at my side. There's nothing left to hold back.

Outside, the ridge stretches northwest toward Drakfell. I'm going to take it back, and the woman with steady hands and no compound left to grind is coming with me.

17

SIGNE

Stellan's war council has never included a healer, but the Northern Pack's alpha doesn't look surprised when I take the empty chair at the far end of the table. He looks like a man who should've invited me years ago and knows it. The acknowledgment lives in the brief nod he gives me before turning his attention to the map spread across the oak.

The great hall carries the held quiet of wolves who've stopped pretending the situation is manageable. Torches throw uneven light across the territorial boundaries inked on the map's surface. The shadows pool in the mountain passes the way real snow pools in the drainage gaps Gunnar identified on the western approach.

Four wolves sit at this table. Stellan at the head, because Stellan is always at the head. Gunnar to his right, the beta's controlled posture communicating readiness the way a blade communicates sharpness: through stillness and edge.

Eirik across from me, his chair pushed back from the table far enough that the distance reads as restraint rather than comfort. His body is coiled in what I've learned means his wolf is running close to the surface, and the heat coming off his skin reaches me across the oak.

I smell him. I've been smelling him since we came down from the cottage, and the absence of the suppressant means his scent lands without the chemical buffer that's been muting it for weeks. Alpine pine, forge smoke, and underneath both, the alpha frequency that my body answers with a precision no compound could replicate and no clinical vocabulary can diminish.

My wolf doesn't stir. My wolf stretches, full-bodied and unhurried, because the cage is open and the animal on the other side of the table is hers. She knows it.

I fold my hands on the oak and wait for Stellan to speak.

"Balric pulled his wounded back across the border after the attack," Stellan says. "Gunnar's patrols tracked the retreat to the Drakfell boundary. He's regrouping, not withdrawing."

"He can't afford to withdraw." Eirik's voice carries the rough edge of a wolf who slept on a cottage floor and woke with attitude set. "He committed wolves to an assault on Northern Pack territory. If he pulls back empty-handed, the wolves who followed him because he looked stronger than my father start wondering if he is. And my uncle handles that kind of scrutiny with a blade."

"Then he attacks again," Gunnar says. "With more wolves and better intelligence."

"He attacks again." Eirik leans forward, forearms on the table. The restraint I noted earlier dissolves. What replaces it looks less like strategy and more like a wolf who wants to run northwest right now and is forcing himself to sit in a chair instead. "Or we stop waiting for him to come to us."

The forward motion brings his scent closer, and my spine locks because the alpha frequency lands harder when he moves. The knot last night recalibrated something in my biochemistry that no textbook accounts for: proximity to him is no longer discomfort. It's gravitational. The pull has weight and direction and my body leans into it before my mind can intervene.

I hold position. I hold the mask. But Eirik's nostrils flare on an inhale that tells me my effort at composure is generating a scent that contradicts it.

Stellan's gaze moves to me. The weight of the Northern Pack alpha's attention is a thing I've carried for years without flinching. It doesn't make me flinch now, but the quality has changed. He's looking at his healer the same way he looks at his beta, a resource he's been underusing.

"You treated Balric's wolves after the corridor fight," he says. "The ones who survived."

"I treated every wolf who needed treatment. Their pack affiliation didn't change the wound margins."

"What did the wound margins tell you?"

The question is an invitation I've been waiting for without knowing I was waiting. The clinical assessment I ran while suturing Drakfell wolves in the infirmary was automatic, the healer's reflex of cataloging every body that passes through my hands. What I cataloged goes beyond the injuries.

"Balric's wolves are underfed," I say. "Not starving, but losing condition fast. The muscle density suggests a pack whose supply lines fractured when the leadership did."

Stellan's expression doesn't change. Gunnar's does.

"The healing factors are sluggish, the tissue knitting slower than baseline for wolves their size, which indicates chronic stress hormones suppressing the recovery cascade. Two of the wolves I treated had older injuries, bruising along the ribs in the pattern of disciplinary strikes, the kind an alpha leaves when compliance needs reinforcing."

Eirik's jaw tightens. I continue before the tightening becomes language.